I hate monks for thematic reasons; I think they’re stupid. Total personal bias.
And yeah, Aeon, I think we play very differently. And Barkskin is a good spell, but I don’t find it to be as amazing as you do. It’s no Haste ;)
Fair enough; now get the game and let me know if its the second coming of BG2. I know for me it never will be as I have serious, fundamental issues with the combat engine in NWN2, but I want to like this game, and I want to want to play it.
It’s good for you if you like oldschool D&D ruleset abuse. It’s a lot more IWD than BG, though.
MOTB is as close to BG2 as you will get until Dragon Age comes out (but that’s not even D&D).
I’d like to see a BG3 in my lifetime.
Just got to the sword coast. Besides the fact that the random encounters are pretty difficult for my level and the fact I’m only playing on normal… thumbs way up. It’s sort of like a DnD version of Space Rangers right now.
I really don’t understand the constant Space Rangers comparisons.
I guess not everybody shares my opinion that Space Rangers 2 is a badly designed game with many completely disconnected, badly designed game parts, but from 4X strategy over adventures to fantasy rpg… which game is NOT like space rangers?! :/
Not sure if you’re willing to buy DD, but direct2drive has a bundle pack of NWN2 Gold and SoZ for $63: Direct2Drive
That’s about7 dollars off getting Gold and SoZ, or 17 off getting NWN2, MotB and SoZ separately.
Every day that deal looks better and better. There’s a very small chance I won’t have bought it by this weekend if you guys keep saying the things you’ve been saying about it. My wallet hates all of you!
Unless you live outside of North America (and Mexico). Then you can’t buy the game on D2D. Why? Because you can’t.
I haven’t installed this yet but I find it interesting to just think of making up a party. I’m relatively familiar with the D&D rules but not as hardcore on some of this board. What are some good builds to make a party with these 4 core characters?:
1)Heavy Front Line Fighter - preferably using a 2 handed weapon (greatsword).
2)Duel Wielding Backstabber / Light Fighter - (dual short swords probably)
3)Divine Spellcaster - I would want a lot of divine spellpower here
4)Arcane Spellcaster - again, emphasis on heavy spell power
Ideally, for aesthetic reasons, all 4 characters would wield swords of some type (my party name will be “The Sharpe Swords”. I don’t really care for ranged weapons in D&D so no archer characters. Although I want 2 spellcasters, I would like them to be as tough defensively as possible, since I hate having squishies.
My initial thoughts are:
- Fighter + something fighter-y ? What mixes well with Fighter? Dwarven Defender? Weaponmaster? Frenzied Berserker?
2)Rogue with a few levels of fighter, specifically to get some duel wielding feats and weapon specialization. Something like L1=Rogue, L2=Fighter, L3=Rogue, L4=Fighter, then level as a rogue for awhile.
3)Cleric! (I prefer Clerics to druids). Is just pure cleric the way to go here or are there good mix and matches?
4)Wizard or Sorceror? What mixes well with these to give them a bit of survivability?
I would want a good mix of skills including diplomacy and crafting.
What does the hivemind suggest?
I’d replace number two with a Ranger, or more importantly somebody with the skills for world map travel, which could be a rogue. Survival and spot are both really handy, as is the stealth skills. On another note, they games gives you “cohorts,” basic NPCs that can join the party if you fulfill their criteria. To start you can only have 1 bringing your party up to 5, but I believe there is a feat to increase that to 6.
This has been really disappointing. The difficulty changes only serve to highlight how inadequate real-time combat is when using a system with the depth of D&D. It’s alot of fun coming up with strategies to overcome different encounters with the wealth of tools available (in comparison to, say, King’s Bounty), but actually executing those strategies is an exercise in frustration as even the upgraded AI is totally inadequate.
Other oddities include the load times which are still surprisingly long, and which you’ll be seeing more often with the death and resting changes. An overland map that only uses the skills of the currently selected character (Is everyone else blindfolded?) and doesn’t remember the character that was selected when you back to it (Yes game, I did want my wizard with -4 survival to lead the party with an encounter 5 levels higher heading towards me as the game lazily fades into the already active world map!). And enough random encounters to wipe out every living thing on the planet several times over.
There’s just no winning here. Even if your victorious in the battle you probably have to (load and) go outside and try to rest and probably (load and) get pulled into a random encounter and if you survive you get to (load and) try rest again or walk, walk, walk to a town where you’re guaranteed a peaceful night’s rest and walk, walk, walk back and if anything goes wrong you might as well load your save from the beginning and try it all again. You can buy items that let you rest indoors, but at the point I’ve gotten to they still cost around 10% of my worldly goods which, of course, the CRPG player in me won’t let me squander good money on.
Overall the easy mode mechanics the NWN2 had were actually wallpapering over some pretty major holes. Getting rid of them just brings you back to BG1-hurl-the-CDs-out-the-window territory. With turn-based combat where you actually had the power to manage the limited resources you’re given (and a RAID array) this might be an awesome game, as it is I really just can’t stand it any more. YMMV of course, I obviously hate BG’s/NWN’s combat with a fiery passion so I have a very one-sided opinion.
So. Eh. Hitting Space for pause is just right out of the question? Just wonderin.
How does stealth work on the overland map, if at all? Is it based just on the party leader or does it depend on everyone having stealth?
To start you can only have 1 bringing your party up to 5, but I believe there is a feat to increase that to 6.
Correct: I forget the feat name, but it lets you add a second cohort IIRC. MILD SPOILER: the first two cohorts you get offered are a ranger and druid.
The game only uses the skills of the person you have selected (which can anyone in your party, including cohorts).
Pausing isn’t the same as true turn-based combat. In tabletop D&D, a fireball goes off exactly where you want it: on top of the bad guys. There’s no ambiguity in targeting, even though the spell technically takes a few seconds to cast: if you want it to hit only the bad guys, while miraculously avoiding singing the good guys who are just inches away, then it’s very easy to do so.
In BG1’s real time + pause system, you can start casting the spell while paused, but then the casting time kicks in during which everyone moves around the battlefield. End result: when the spell actually goes off, the area that you selected to be the blast zone might now be empty, or populated by good guys.
This is why playing a blaster mage in BG1 could be an exercise in frustration.
BG1 pissed me off when the fucking Sirens kept charming by ELF. My ELF who is suppose to have high ass resistance to charm spells. chunky death explosion
BG1 was awesome. Homing arrows. :)
That actually wasn’t the case in BG1 – in that game, pre-expansion, the area of effect was determined immediately when the spell was cast - so you only hit creatures in that area, and even if those characters left the area by the time the spell arrived, they would still take damage as if they were in the middle of the impact zone.
It was a design decision to avoid what you’re complaining about, but it also led to other consequences, like the “homing arrows” you mentioned - if you were in sight when the arrow as shot, it didn’t matter if you moved way by the time the arrow visually arrived. In other words, the graphics didn’t always accurately show what had happened.
That was changed with the expansion and the rest of the BG series - to actually allow you to run out of the area of effect of a spell. It effectively changed the D&D rules, but only because that abstraction was unnecessary (and more annoying to people) since they were denied the opportunity to move when they saw the attack coming.
I must have been thinking of BG2, not 1. Fights in that game were always terribly chaotic.
So a couple of things happened today, and I’m now the proud owner of this game! Most of them involved money showing up from work and the gov’t and from the ramp my brother and I built (yay craigslist!). I still wasn’t going to get the game, but then I remembered something super important. D2D owed me ten bucks because I made them my bitch over some stuff they pulled a few months back!
So I got the game for 20 bucks, yay!
I’ll tell you about my awesome adventures in wherever I’ll be killing people this time when they happen.